RECALLING what life was like in the early 1900s is what Joyce Bennett from Okehampton has been doing for a Channel Four documentary.
Mrs Bennett was selected from 1,500 interviewees to be one of 50 people featured in the six-part series starting on Sunday entitled 'Green and Pleasant Land.'
The 82-year-old lady decided to answer a film company's appeal in a newspaper requesting people with memories of this particular time to write in and a long while later she had a call from one of the researchers.
'The series is basically about how people, like myself, coped during those dreadful years,' she said.
Working as a cook in a grand country house at Lewdown and being an unmarried mother when society was not as accepting as it is now were two of the elements of Mrs Bennett's life that appealed to the programme makers.
She said: 'I cannot say too much about the programme but in those days there was rather a stigma attached to being an unmarried mother.
'I was not allowed to have my daughter christened on a Sunday and the rector would not let me go on the Sunday School outing because I had this baby and I was not married.
'I left the baby with my parents so I could carry on working to pay for things like baby food — there was no Social Security then.'
Mrs Bennett was a live-in cook at Townleigh House at Lewdown and used to cycle the three and a half miles home to see her daughter once a week if the weather was OK.
'I decided to tell my story because I thought it was a good thing for the younger generation to know how people of my age lived back then and the sort of conditions we lived in,' she added.
'It was quite upsetting to talk about those times because it all came back to me and even one of the researchers was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.'
The film company spent a day at Mrs Bennett's house earlier this year and she will be featured in programmes two and three. 'Green and Pleasant Land' will be shown at 8pm.